Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Pavan Sondur, CEO of Unbxd (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What are the adoption that you’re seeing amongst online retailers of using technologies like yours?

Pavan Sondur: We’re seeing a paradigm shift in the entire e-commerce industry. We are moving away from one generation of search which is an IT infrastructure problem to an AI or machine learning model-based engine which ingests a lot of external data. It not just does search but is also able to do a lot more intelligent things in real-time which go beyond the capabilities of humans. That’s what’s happening.

There’s a clear shift in preference for this because this indicates more shift from a user and visitor perspective. In light of how competitive the e-commerce industry is, the adoption is rapidly increasing for anything that adds sophistication and growth to the e-commerce industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the 30,000 foot level. What are the emerging trends and what are the open problems?

Pavan Sondur: Some of the key problems are that there’s a whole bunch of technologies that are, very soon, going to be clubbed under legacy because of the non-AI touch to them. A lot of things are still manually-driven.

For instance, take generation of data. If a brand today wants to generate content for a product line that they’ve manufactured, there’s still massive manual curation of all of that data. There is little intelligence going in there.

The second piece is, if you look at not just the online retailer segment but every single industry, all of the systems that involve rule creations are all on the way out. Those are some of the key opportunities for technology to come in and solve them tangibly and create that transition path.

Sramana Mitra: If you were starting a new company today, what would you start?

Pavan Sondur: This might sound strange, but I would start the exact same thing.

Sramana Mitra: You’re doing that. I’m asking for gaps in the ecosystem where there is an opportunity to start something new.

Pavan Sondur: Today, it’s about connecting a lot of different things together. There’s Internet of Things, which connects a lot of devices together. There are so many services that we consume. If every single thing can get connected in a way that makes life easy, that would be the single biggest opportunity that is out there.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Pavan Sondur, CEO of Unbxd
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